A day I will never forget is coming up.  Thursday 4th February 1960 was the day I entered Her Majesty`s armed forces to begin my 721 days National Service.   Most years, ever since I started writing this blog, I have marked the occasion by recalling some of the events during my `conscription` and even now, 61 years on, the fateful day brings back so many memories of that time in my life.

But this year my mind has turned to the few days before I was whisked away on the long journey to Catterick Camp in north Yorkshire, then on to what was then West Germany before finally my demob chart reached its denouement.

Not sure why those few precious days leading up to that Thursday have come back to me so clearly, but I remember just about everything about them in that final countdown.  At the time, I had been living in `digs` here in Kent ever since my parents had left the area to take a pub on the Berkshire/Hampshire border.  When they left, I didn`t want to make the break from the job I had, the cricket and football teams I played for, the friends I had and, of course, the captivating charms of the future Mrs. Snopper and her idyllic Kentish village.

But a couple of days before the Thursday I did leave all that behind and spent the last two days staying in my parents` pub with the intention of saying my goodbyes not only to them but also other family scattered around the south and west of the country.  So, borrowing my father`s car, visits were made to relatives in Hampshire and Berkshire and those more far flung in the west country.  I went to Swindon, where my maternal grandparents lived and where my mother and I had stayed for a while during the war, and where, for a time, my mother worked as a conductress on the Swindon Corporation buses.  

I will never know why - perhaps it was a desperate attempt to grab hold of something `civilian` before the unknown of military life took over - but I went to a record shop in Swindon and bought Peter Sellers` `Sings for Swinging Sellers` - which I never got to hear until after I came back to civilian life, by which time my taste in music had gone up a few notches.

But that was that, farewells were made and off I went.  I remember counting the hours until I had to leave it all behind and when I started my conscription I started counting the days until it was all over.   These days I content myself with just counting the days until the shortest day of the year is due and until the end of March when the clocks go on and Spring arrives.  That`s just 57 days away and, like demob, it can`t come soon enough.